Return to Me Page 4

  Part Two

  Form follows function—that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in spiritual union.

  —Frank Lloyd Wright, architect

  Chapter Five

  As soon as we cleared security at Newark Airport, Dad waved from the barricade, iPhone to his ear, and finished his conversation: “Okay, Mother, they’re here. I got to go. Well, Adam’s not always right, but if you want to buy that property, it’s up to you. Okay, tomorrow. Yes, I’ll call you tomorrow.” With a long-suffering sigh, Dad hung up and pocketed his phone as though it were a distasteful secret he needed to tuck away. I had a sudden inkling of what my own life in college would be like in a few weeks. Like Dad, I could relocate across the country and still not be able to escape my mother’s control.

  Before I could commiserate, Dad hugged us each hard, then grabbed my messenger bag in one hand and slung Reid’s backpack over his shoulder. He charged toward the baggage carousels. My phone chimed with Jackson’s text: Touched down safe? Hello. Bruised and not just from missing you. Worried, I stopped abruptly in the middle of the corridor to text him back, asking what had happened. I hadn’t realized Mom was trudging behind us until she stepped on my heels and sighed like I was in her way.

  “Come on, Reb,” Mom urged as though I were five and could get lost wandering from our pack. Scooting around me, she hiked her misshapen tote bag higher onto her shoulder; the sack bulged with emergency snacks and supplies, like antiseptic wipes to kill the germs lurking on the plane’s folding trays.

  “So, you kids excited to see our new house, or what?” Dad asked.

  Baggage coursed down the chute and onto the carousel. As if this largesse of other people’s possessions reminded Mom of what was still trucking across the country to us, she said, “We don’t have furniture. Maybe we should spend a couple of nights in your apartment.”

  Dad shrugged. “Doesn’t it make more sense to get the kids settled into the house as soon as possible?”

  I rubbed my hands together, dry from the plane ride, uneasy because Mom was changing her well-armored plan and Dad was the one thwarting it. But why would he? He knew I wanted to be in New York. Now I wished I had landed anywhere but here. Wished I could jet forward six weeks, when freshman year would start and I could leave Mom and Dad to their house, furnished or not. Mom must have been watching out of her peripheral vision because she held out a small vial of lotion to me.

  “Besides, one of the women at the moving company got air mattresses and sleeping bags for us,” Dad said as he checked a message on his iPhone. “It’s no big deal, Bits. It’ll be just like camping in your treehouse, right, Rebecca?”

  No matter how much I rubbed my hands together, I couldn’t work in all the lotion, leaving my skin slippery, like I had dipped them in a vat of grease. Even though I was back to being the cheerleader, I couldn’t muster the energy to agree with Dad that, yeah, sleeping on the ground was no biggie. So I simply nodded.

  The tote bag slipped off her shoulder, but Mom didn’t bother adjusting it, too busy scouting for our luggage even as she held out her hand to take the excess lotion from me.

  The one sixth sense I might admit to having is my ability to feel space. For as long as I can remember, I could tell within a moment of entering a building—home, library, corporate campus—if the space worked or if it failed. The first time I felt true rightness was on Grandpa George’s houseboat, bought a month before I nearly drowned. Even when I was seven, some internal tuning mechanism had declared this home pitch-perfect. That sense of rightness solidified the moment I spotted Grandpa’s inviting window seat beneath the reclaimed wood stairs.

  Our massive Georgian house in New Jersey, complete with faux Grecian columns, couldn’t have differed more from Grandpa’s charming houseboat, much less our quaint cottage on Lewis Island. A Street of Dreams house—that’s how Peter, our architect, would have dubbed this mansion. An opulent show home built specifically for once-a-year luxury-house tours to showcase indoor waterfalls, twenty-thousand-bottle wine cellars, and theaters complete with red velvet curtains.

  I stood in the cavernous foyer, shocked silent as I scanned the cold space. Even with every single stick of our furniture in it, this house would feel uninhabited and empty.

  “I’m sure the house will be fine,” Mom said, staring up at the overhead chandelier papered with dehydrated moths that had mistaken the hot lightbulb for home.

  Though Mom’s intention may have been to reassure, Dad flushed at her “fine,” that damning descriptor of the Bland and Boring. I seethed at Mom even as I grinned toothily at Dad, determined to love our new home: “It’s going to be awesome to have my own bathroom.”

  Dad swept his arm over Reid’s shoulder. “Yeah, don’t you kids think it’ll be fun to live somewhere with enough space for once?”

  “Heck, yeah!” I said, even if I wondered why Dad had gotten a place this mammoth when I would be living at college most of the time. Quickly, I read Jackson’s new text explaining that his body was battered and bruised from a non-life-threatening spill. Aching to be with him, I replied: Battered and bruised by parental bickering… and missing you.

  Still, Dad had it right. Six thousand square feet would provide us all with ample space away from Mom. Tired of the tension, I stepped away from my mother to close the front door, but not before I breathed in air so humid my lungs congested. I had the sudden image of being swallowed whole within the jaws of the mansion’s wide front door. Even so, I forced myself to shut the door as Dad suggested, “Why don’t you kids go explore?”

  Reid scampered up the spiral staircase as if he were at summer camp, ferreting out the nooks and crannies before all the other kids. From upstairs, he shouted, “This is our own temple!”

  Dad beamed and agreed, “The Temple of Muir.”

  Meanwhile, I turned another full, slow circle in this paean to modern architecture so vastly different from Mom’s shabby chic and my Zen minimalist styles.

  “It’ll feel like home soon,” Mom assured me, assuming I felt as out of place as she did.

  “It’s home already,” I shot back, and bolted upstairs, wanting to escape in my sketchbook. As I reached the landing, a feeling of disquietude made me hesitate. I heard a sharp intake of breath, the breath that preceded wild sobbing.

  Stop, stop, stop.

  “Welcome home,” called Dad.

  Reid’s bedroom door was closed, but I heard his excited murmuring as he investigated his space. Then I passed what had to be the master bedroom, where garish curtains of aqua and fuchsia bookended the picture windows—brazen colors Mom would never pick, not even for her container gardens.

  Further down the hall, my bedroom was painted in the same shades as home: a deep plum on the far wall, soothing taupe on the remaining three. Even the windows were draped in the same linen curtains. Other than the air mattress topped with a rolled-up sleeping bag, there was nothing in the bedroom… except the brown box in the middle of the floor. I settled myself on the beige carpet and picked up the light box, cradling it on my lap as I read the printed label from a company I didn’t recognize.

  Inside, a delicate wrapping of tissue paper protected the small cardboard jewelry box. From that encasement, I pulled out a necklace with a square pendant. No note, just an etched inscription: LIVE EVERYTHING.

  There was nothing else. But nothing more was needed. I knew who had sent this, but how had Jackson known that this precise message was what I needed right now? I slipped the long necklace over my head and pressed the pendant to my heart. The room, empty as it was, felt like mine.

  “So what do you think?” Dad asked after I rejoined my parents in the living room a short while later and lowered myself to the marble floor beside him. My lips parted, ready to thank him for arranging my bedroom, when Reid hurtled down the stairs with a loud “Mom, you’re awesome!”

  Of course it was Mom’s idea to re-create our bedrooms so we’d feel instantly at home. I flushed at my oversight
, started to pull away from Dad, but his arm tightened around my shoulders to anchor me at his side.

  “You like it?” Mom asked Reid.

  “Love it!” he yelled, and held up a new set of MythBusters DVDs. “Thanks, Mom!”

  “Did you find your moving-in gift, too?” Mom asked me.

  I shook my head. “Just something from Jackson.”

  “Oh.” Mom’s forehead furrowed as she lifted herself off the cold stone floor. “Then it’s probably in the closet. I’ll find it.”

  As she did, Dad clapped Reid’s shoulder with one hand. “You can thank Giselle, too. She orchestrated all this.”

  “Who’s Giselle?” Reid asked, reading the back of the DVD case.

  “One of the women at the moving company.”

  Mom halted at the stairs and turned around. Her eyes didn’t waver from Dad. “We should get her a little something for all her help. Do you think she’d want a scarf? Or chocolate?”

  I had a sudden image of Giselle—tall, fine-boned, long hair. No, she wouldn’t be one to devour chocolate, to dare add a stray ounce on her body.

  “Definitely not chocolate,” I said.

  Mom frowned as she leaned against the stair rail. “Why?”

  Like an energetic puppy caged overlong, Dad sprang to his feet and trotted to the front door, saying, “I’m sorry about this, but I got to run to work. Emergency.”

  “But we just got here,” I said, even as Mom took a step toward him with a “Today, Thom? Really?”

  “I can’t help it, but hey! I almost forgot.” He crouched down to his briefcase resting against the far wall in the foyer, and withdrew two flat parcels. “Something to welcome you to Manhattan.”

  “That’s so nice,” Mom said, craning closer to watch Reid and me unwrap the presents: a membership to the Museum of Modern Art for me, and for Reid, a pass to the Museum of Natural History.

  After breathing out a long “Wicked!” Reid demanded, “When can we go?”

  “Maybe tomorrow. There’s so much to see in Manhattan.” Dad practically bounced on his toes. “You guys are going to love living at its back door! Just wait.”

  I caught Mom gazing wistfully at the thick concrete door as it shut behind Dad. Before she noticed me, she locked the door with a sigh.

  “Oh, Reb, you did find your present,” she said, smiling at the pendant I wore. “It looks great on you.”

  I cupped the pendant. “I thought this was from Jackson.”

  “No.” Her lips pursed briefly, a faint line. Then, a scant moment later, my move-in gift forgotten, Mom ordered us, “Go unpack.”

  That evening Dad met us in the town square, where Mom, Reid, and I had been waiting for nearly two hours. All around us, happy, well-fed families were parked on their picnic blankets, content from their gourmet dinners. Reid had been getting progressively grumpier until Jackson reminded me by text of the emergency food Mom always carried. One of those just-in-case protein bars had saved Jackson on our Tuscany trip four months ago.

  “Hey, there you are!” Dad said jovially, as if we were the ones holding him up.

  He approached our fleece blanket that Mom had somehow thought to stuff into her luggage. By then it was almost eight, and Dad had been gone for five hours. I didn’t know why, but I watched him carefully when Mom asked him where he’d been and why he hadn’t answered her phone calls. Dad simply shrugged and said, “The emergency at work was gnarlier than I thought.”

  I busied myself with making room for Dad on the blanket. Even then, I couldn’t help wondering: If he had driven all the way into the city, why didn’t we watch the fireworks and spend the night there, as Mom had suggested? As I had wanted?

  “So, who’s ready for dinner?” Dad asked, hefting two plastic bags that strained from the weight of our meal.

  Reid asked ravenously, “What did you get?”

  Dad settled himself next to Reid, sitting on the grass rather than on the blanket with the rest of us. “The works for Fourth of July.”

  No matter how much I tried to clamp down on the feeling that something was amiss, urgency needled me. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I wanted to knock the ribs, the baked beans, the corn bread off my plate. And Mom’s. This was the food of the fairies who tricked you into believing you were dining on chocolate, only to find yourself chewing a mouthful of dirt. There was no rational explanation for my panic, no logical reason for my complete loss of appetite. It was just there, as real as a frightened heartbeat.

  Don’t eat, don’t eat, I wanted to warn Mom.

  I needn’t have worried. Under my watchful gaze, Mom pushed the gooey ribs around on her plate for a few minutes before she abandoned them, uneaten, too.

  “Too hot to eat?” Dad asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said right as the first Roman candle burst in the sky, showering gold dust above us.

  In the afterglow of a crimson starburst, I caught Dad shrugging as Mom waved off a piece of pie that he offered. He took a big bite, the juice from the apple pie dewing his chin. I couldn’t bear to watch him eat so greedily while I was sick to my stomach with foreboding. So I lowered myself onto my back and stared up at the night sky splintering with fireworks.

  Chapter Six

  Breakfast the next morning was a grim affair of leftovers, since the refrigerator was the Sahara desert of food, desolate in its emptiness. Back on Lewis Island, Mom had vigilantly stocked our fridge with produce from local farms, and gallons of milk so fresh you could hear cows moo with every poured cup.

  “But I want cereal,” Reid said plaintively, his mouth curling in disgust at the cold rib glistening with coagulated fat on the paper towel that served as his plate.

  With an elbow propped on the kitchen table, Mom leaned her head against her open palm, then methodically smoothed her hair off her forehead. Her eyes opened slowly and she said, “We’ll have Dad drive us to the grocery store as soon as he’s done with his shower.”

  “I’m going to learn how to drive a stick,” Reid grumbled.

  “Good idea,” Mom said. “I told your dad it would have made more sense for him to buy an automatic in the first place.”

  By the time Dad appeared in the kitchen, hair damp, I had fashioned a spoon out of a binder clip for Reid. The rejiggered clip so appealed to Reid that he managed a few bites of the potato salad, enough to keep his low-blood-sugar grumpiness at bay. That won me such a heartfelt, relieved “Thanks, honey” from Mom, I felt exhausted but didn’t know why exactly. Maybe it had something to do with the restless night I had had, too uneasy to sleep for fear of what I’d dream. I chalked that up to never spending any real time in a house this large.

  “Hey, Thom, your mother left a message on my phone. She wants you to call this morning,” Mom said as she set a paper towel in front of Dad.

  With a sigh, Dad cast an exasperated scowl at the empty counter where our espresso machine should have resided. “God, I need coffee.”

  “Sorry, no coffee,” said Mom, whipping around from the fridge with a flourish. “But… ta-da! Breakfast is served.”

  Dad’s expression when Mom presented the ribs to him so mirrored Reid’s revulsion that she and I laughed, and I made a mental note to text this to Jackson. Dad shrugged self-consciously without taking a bite of what he had so eagerly devoured the night before.

  “I’ll pick up some breakfast on the way to the airport,” he said.

  “You’re leaving?” I asked. Dad’s announcement surprised Reid so much that he stopped spooning potato salad into his mouth.

  “But it’s Sunday.” Mom leaned back against the counter as if she had been punched.

  Dad held up his phone, but whether it was the culprit or the alibi, I couldn’t tell. “I told you about this last week.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mom said flatly. “Rebecca needs a way to get to her interview tomorrow, and I need to go grocery shopping. I thought we agreed you were going to drive us.”

  “God, Bits.” Dad shook his head and stared out the kitc
hen window like he wanted to escape. “You can just rent a car.”

  The last time I had felt tension this sharp-edged, I had been a half-drowned girl in my hospital bed. Even though I couldn’t understand what was so important that Dad had to leave us when we had just arrived, I assured him, “Dad, it’s no biggie. We’ll figure it out.”

  “That’s my girl.” Dad shot me an approving smile before trotting jauntily out the door to our one car that only he could drive. He sped away.

  The idea of not making the most of a spare moment was about as appealing to Mom as stepping on a slime-yellow banana slug with her bare foot. Sometime between Dad’s heading for the airport and her cleaning up after breakfast, Mom realized that she, Reid, and I could get acquainted with our neighborhood and go for a run at the same time.

  “Why are we doing this, again?” Reid groused as he thrust his feet into his sneakers by the front door. I didn’t have an answer to that question, or any of the other mysteries that were my mother’s unfathomable decision-making.

  “Speed Racer,” I muttered after Mom’s back as she ran well ahead of us. Wiping the sweat off my face, I wished I had swiped on another layer of deodorant.

  Not a single other person was jogging in this sweltering humidity. A familiar rumble caught my attention. Jackson? I spun around, giddy even though I knew my guy was back at home. Instantly, I felt silly for grinning at a white-haired man in his air-conditioned Mustang, who cast me a look that was snagged between amused and bemused.

  “Just look at that garden,” Mom called out, slowing to scrutinize the raised vegetable beds in a neighbor’s side yard. It didn’t require too much imagination to picture her transforming our lush, green front lawn into a self-sustaining, organic farm… and dividing our bounty between ourselves, our neighbors, and the local food bank.